The Tim Ferriss Show #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants
Outsider Perspective Is A Competitive Edge
- People from outside technology bring a superpower: a different perspective that reveals opportunities others miss.
- Caterina Fake attributes many successful investments to cultural and humanistic lenses rather than typical pattern recognition.
Flickr's Last-Minute Rescue
- Flicker survived on literal fumes and a last-minute Canadian grant that arrived days before Christmas.
- That unexpected funding enabled the team to keep servers running and pivot into the product that became Flickr.
Manually Seed Your Community
- Participate actively and personally in early community building instead of delegating it away.
- Founders set community norms by example, so greet users and engage frequently in the early days.
"I really am a big believer in people's creativity flourishing when they come at things from a different direction and see things in a different way." — Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake (@caterina) is a long-time Silicon Valley pioneer. She is the Cofounder of Yes VC, a pre-seed and seed stage fund investing in ideas that elevate our collective humanity. Previously, she worked at Founder Collective as a Founder Partner, served as Chair of Etsy, and was the co-founder of Flickr.
At Flickr, Caterina and her team introduced many of the innovations — newsfeeds, hashtags, "followers," "likes" — that have become commonplace online. Caterina went on to found several more startups (Findery, Hunch) and became an active investor, advisor and board member, helping to build companies like Etsy and Kickstarter from their beginnings. (Other investments include Stack Overflow, Cloudera, and Blue Bottle Coffee.) Caterina is an early creator of online communities and a long time advocate of the responsibility of entrepreneurs for the outcomes of their technologies.
Caterina sits on the board of Public Goods, the Sundance Institute, and McSweeney's. She was given the Silicon Valley Visionaries award in 2018 and has received honorary doctorates from both the New School and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Caterina is also the host of the new podcast Should This Exist?, which asks the question, "What is technology doing to our humanity?" Should This Exist? can be listened to on Apple Podcasts, at shouldthisexist.com or anywhere podcasts are found.
Please enjoy!
Click here for the show notes for this episode.
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